Friday: we played at Paris on Ponce for a Cystic Fibrosis benefit. I think I've finally figured out how to get from the front door to the stage without getting lost. Things were so much better when you could drive up to the doors next to the stage!
This room has its charms; stage lighting is not one of them! It's really dark, even more so when you're wearing sunglasses. Honorable mention: the phone booth of a dressing room, which also serves as a passage for servers between the kitchen and the room. It also houses a toilet and sink, and we had to fight off people who were presumably too lazy to walk to the real restrooms.
Mark Cobb debuted his new/vintage Tequila Sunrise Vistalite drums. You can read about them here. Very cool looking. We picked them up in NYC on our last trip--the seller delivered them from Montreal.
Other fun: two ladies entered our dressing room with the great idea that what we do is so amazing that we should franchise it and cash in. We tried to explain that there was more to it than just finding another band to play the same set list, but she wasn't hearing it. Have you heard about the Yacht Rock Schooner? I tried really hard to fart while all nine of us were stuffed into the dressing room…of all the times to come up empty!
We loaded out in the freezing cold around the stream of pee from the drunk guy. Thanks for that.
Saturday: where is Bluffton, GA? We left mid morning to get down there (halfway between Columbus, GA, and Tallahassee, FL), to play a wedding for a 10 High alumni.
The reception was held in a giant tent on a quail hunting farm. Agh! Open tent! Bugs during the day, freezing cold at night. It was beautiful, though. Our green room was in the tack room for the horses.
They also had two HUGE mules that were at least six feet at the shoulder.
This gig was a bit unusual because we played a jazz trio set for the cocktail hour, which we've never done before. A nice warm up for me before the main gig, though as the sun went down, my hands got more and more stiff.
Other than that, it was a pretty standard gig. No Pete on this one, but we covered his vocals as best we could.
My hands got really cold and my horns got really flat. Other than that, my gear worked fine.
Both gigs had Kip running sound, and he was gracious enough to drive us home from this one (I slept). We got back to Atlanta around 4 AM. We divided the gear and went home. I went to bed around 5:30 AM.
Sunday: up at 7 AM! I slept in the van, but I still felt really bad. My AM church gig was pretty normal--nothing really to report. I went home and crashed for a few hours.
My PM church gig was ok; it went a little long because of some special ceremonial stuff. This was the Sunday where they were introducing the candidates for church membership. Somebody (I guess) thought it would be really dramatic to have there be a knocking at the church door, and then the altar boys would open the doors and the new people would file in. Instead, the four big bangs on the church doors scared the shit out of just about everybody in the congregation.
